


Cas-ti-el

by Valinde (Valyria)



Series: Ten Trope Prompts [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pining Dean, Pre-Slash, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 12:43:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1941591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valyria/pseuds/Valinde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean had figured out the problem. The reason no one could translate the name written on his arm was because it wasn't one. It was just a line of meaningless gibberish. He didn't have a match.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cas-ti-el

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Christi](http://watchingpornwithcas.tumblr.com/) for betaing this for me!

The problem was, Dean’s mark, when it finally appeared on his 16th birthday, wasn’t a name at all. At first he’d been excited, because he thought it must mean his soulmate, whoever they were, was some from some exotic place on the other side of the world, but no matter how many books he looked through trying to decipher the mark, the weird squiggles on the inside of his left wrist remained a mystery.

Dean lost track of how many trips he took to the library in whatever town they were holed up in to try and figure out what language it was. To start with his dad would just wave him off, but when he kept coming back glum and empty-handed, John took matters into his own hands and came along. They were in Nebraska the first time, on the tail of a werewolf, but his dad took an afternoon off the hunt to drive him down to the local public library and go through books with him. Dean was sure with his dad’s help he’d have an answer. John Winchester was basically a badass detective – he was as good at figuring out mysteries as he was killing monsters - but by the time the time it was closing, his dad was just frowning. “Wherever this soulmate of yours is from Dean,” he said. “It’s a long way from Omaha.”

Dean sighed and rubbed at the stubborn mark. “Yeah.”

His dad winked. “Cheer up kid, we’ll figure it out.”

At Dean’s unconvinced shrug he continued, “You know how many Marys I met before I found the _right_ one? Having a weird name on your arm might be a blessing in disguise you know.”

Dean hadn’t thought of it that way. He eyed the dark symbols on his arms curiously. At least chances were he’d only meet one Thirteen-squiggle-squiggle-line-zee-line-squiggle in his life. No chance of confusion there.

A few weeks later, after Dean had helped his dad deal with a poltergeist outside of Maine, his dad took him to a college library. “They’ve got books, ones for grad students, stuff you don’t see at the public libraries,” he said then lowered his voice. “Handy for looking into the occult.”

Dean felt embarrassed wandering around the college campus, so clearly a high school kid with his dad, but just like John had said there were _way_ more books in the languages section than at the public libraries he’d tried, a lot of them languages Dean had never even heard of.

He’d been dragging his heels the last few times he’d trekked out to the local library to do his ‘research’ but looking at all the books around them, he felt hopeful again, sure they’d find something. And his dad seemed certain as well. They didn’t find anything that first visit, but John talked about how some of the symbols looked a bit like the Sui alphabet he’d found in a book on different Chinese languages and Dean nodded along, tracing his fingers up the narrow line of dark markings along the inside of his wrist. Maybe his soulmate was in China somewhere right now, looking down at the weird English name on their arm, just as confused as Dean was. The thought was oddly reassuring.

They were on the road the next day – a haunting in Colombia – but a few weeks later his dad took him to another college library. Sam insisted on coming along, point blank refusing to stay at the motel. He was at that age where the idea of a soulmate marking was the most exciting thing in the world to him. He made Dean sit still so he could laboriously trace the line of symbols onto a piece of paper, and then he’d batted his eyelashes at one of the librarians until they gave him log on details for one of the computers and started searching academic journals.

Dean and his dad left him to it and pulled down a stack of different books about Chinese languages and started working their way through them. John was right, Sui and a few others were _so_ alike Dean felt for sure that they were close to finally finding the right one – but hours later it was closing time and they still didn’t have an answer.

His dad smiled, but Dean could see he was as frustrated as he was. “Don’t worry,” he said, ruffling his hair and making Dean glare. “We’ll figure it out. And there’s no rush.”

Dean nodded, but he couldn’t help but wish he had a nice _normal_ name etched into his skin. Benny, the boy who’d befriended him for a few weeks down in New Orleans, his had said _Andrea._ All Benny had wondered about was what color her hair was and when he’d meet her. Dean didn’t even know his soulmate’s name, if they were a boy or a girl.

Over the summer Dean, Sam and his dad made a lot of trips to different college libraries - whenever they had some time in-between hunts or they moved to a new town - but by the time Dean turned 17, they still hadn’t even figured out the language. Dean was sick of looking. Well, sick of looking and not finding anything. A week after his birthday, his dad finished a job early and with the week already paid out at the motel had asked if he wanted to check out the library of some private college just outside of town. One of the guys in the history department was a friend of a friend who helped hunters out with more obscure research. John thought he might be able to point them in the right direction. Dean said no. His dad frowned but nodded. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

Dean starting wearing long sleeves every day and stopped thinking about the twisted scrawl down the inside of his arm. Occasionally someone would ask him about it though, and by the time he dropped out of high school and started hunting with his dad full time, he was telling girls at bars and guys he was sharking at pool increasingly exotic lies about it. Having a completely indecipherable mating mark was actually handy when it came to scamming people.

He could flutter his eyelashes and distract guys just as easily as girls without some obviously female name etched into his skin to ruin the effect, and if he played his cards right, it was a great sympathy draw, _‘My mate looked just like you, but she’s gone now…’_ or _‘My mate had eyes the same color as yours, but I lost him…’._ Playing tragically bereaved at such a young age got him everything from blow jobs to free waffles.

Dean had almost come to terms with it, had learned to embrace his fucked up mating mark, when Sam turned 16 and _Jessica_ had blossomed along the skin of his left arm in sweeping cursive. There were no trips to the library or research, just Sam’s giddy excitement. All day he ran through every Jessica he’d ever met and quizzed Dean and John on if they thought one of them could be his soulmate. When he ran out of former classmates he moved onto celebrities. Listening to his little brother wondering if Jessica Simpson or Jessica Alba could be his soulmate proved too much and Dean grabbed the keys to the Impala and was out the door before his dad could stop him.

He went to a bar, flashed a fake ID and then proceeded to get shit-faced and spend the night at a pretty brunette’s house. He didn’t so much as glance down at the dark name on her arm, and she didn’t ask about his. He wasn’t sure what he’d have told her even if she had asked. That something was wrong with him and he didn’t have a real mating mark maybe. Cause he’d figured out that was the problem. The reason no one could ever find out what language it was in was because it didn’t exist. It was _no one’s_ name. It was just a line of meaningless squiggles. There wasn’t someone out there with a crazy foreign name and _Dean_ etched into their skin. He didn’t _have_ a match. There wasn’t a _Jessica_ waiting out there for him.

Before he stumbled back to the motel the next morning, Dean stopped at a tattoo parlor and bought a pair of dark leather cuffs from the long display cases of weird jewelry and piercing stuff. With the cuff on his arm only the trailing end of the mark was visible and his sleeves covered it anyway.

His dad and brother were both subdued when he finally made it back to the room. “Where the hell were you?” his dad asked, but just cuffed him on the back of the head and snatched back the Impala’s keys, sparing him the rant and belting running off would usually have earned him.

Sam gave him guilty looks for a few hours and ignored even glancing at the dark leather on his wrists so carefully Dean knew it was intentional. It was obviously they’d had some sort of heart to heart about him and his messed up mark while he was gone, but mercifully it isn’t brought up. The word ‘Jessica’ doesn’t come up again in conversation for a long time, not at least while Dean is around to hear it.

Not much changed, except Dean stopped using his mark as a means to pick up or score freebies. He just pretended it wasn’t there. If girls he spent the night with asked, he just dodged the question by asking “You got _Dean_ on your arm?” They never did, so his own mark was irrelevant.

Occasionally when he was showering or something he’d catch sight of the symbols, dark against skin pale from the cuff, and he’d touch them, or lift his arm and peer at them like somehow they would magically rearrange themselves into something that wasn’t gibberish, but nothing ever changed and he was always left angry with a bitter hollow feeling in his chest.

Apart from the occasional bout of drunken introspection, Dean didn’t give much thought to it, or to soulmates in general. He spent his early twenties fucking anything that would move and telling himself that he was happy driving from place to place with a revolving door of pretty waitresses and cute bartenders to suck him off in alleyways or the back rooms of shitty bars. He never looked at their marks and hardly ever gave them his real name. But still, when his dad went missing and he broke into Sam’s house, he couldn’t help but glance down at her wrist when Sam introduced his pretty blonde girlfriend as _Jess._

It was dark, but Dean could make out the curve of the S and the rise of L of the _Samuel_ that was scrawled up her arm in his brother’s neat handwriting.

It blew his mind a little, all of a sudden. This girl, this _stranger_ – she had Sam’s name, his mark, indelibly etched into her skin. He reached across his body and clutched at the cuff on his wrist without realizing, old bitter pain reawakened. He was 26 and he didn’t even have a _name,_ let alone a soulmate.

After Jess, Sam was as touchy – even _more_ touchy – than Dean about his mark. It faded. Every time Dean saw it peeking out of his brother’s sleeves it was a littler grayer. It could’ve meant two things. It could’ve meant Sam was gonna have a half-faded mark until he died, the sign of a widower, or it could’ve meant that he was one of those people whose mark faded completely and was replaced by a second soulmate. They didn’t talk about it either way. Dean knew his brother wasn’t ready to think about _Jessica_ being replaced with some other girl’s name - even if that was what Dean secretly hoped would happen. A second chance at happiness for Sam. One Dean wouldn’t fuck up for him.

 

He didn’t give his own stupid mark much thought at all for a long time after that - it was Bobby who ended up deciphering it.

When he showed up graveyard-fresh on his doorstep he was treated to a face full of holy water and then cuts from silver knives and all other manner of pointy things the older hunter insisted on to prove he was himself. Dean was muttering darkly and nursing his sliced up arm when Bobby suddenly caught a hold of it, painfully, and more or less yanked it out of its socket dragging it closer. Dean yelped and Bobby stared down at his wrist with his eyes practically bugging out of his head.

Dean’s cuffs hadn’t been buried with him, but then again neither was his favorite knife and his pendant and one of his silver rings were missing as well. He’d figured Sam had kept them as keepsakes or something. It wasn’t something he’d given a lot of thought to, too distracted by his spontaneous _resurrection_ and the deafening, window-shattering thing that’d been stalking him, but it occurred to him that Bobby had never actually seen the marks. John and Bobby had been fighting around the time Dean got it, and there had been a few years where beyond the occasional hunt related phone call, Dean hadn’t really spoken to or seen him.

“What the hell is this boy?” Bobby demanded, frowning fiercely.

“What?” Dean snapped, yanking his arm out of the older man’s bruising grip. “My mark? Now’s really not the time Bobby. We’ve got more important things to worry about than my fucked-up arm doodle.”

“You’re right,” he grudgingly admitted, leading Dean towards the study. “But a mark in goddamn _Enochian’s_ something you mighta brought up in conversation.”

Dean froze. Bobby slumped down into his chair. “What?” he asked. “Enochian? You… You can read it?”

Bobby huffed. “M’not _fluent_ or nothing, I’d have to look it up, but I know enough to recognize it.”

“Once we figure out what the hell yanked you outta… _hell_ , I’ll look it up for you.” He pulled a half empty bottle of rotgut out of a desk drawer and poured himself a generous glass. “Prolly some new age hippy girl,” he muttered darkly. “Knowing you your soulmate’s probably a goddamn witch or something.”

Enochian, Bobby told him later on, was the language of angels. Supposedly. There wasn’t any solid lore on angels and the popular theory was that Enochian was either a load of bull or the result of some bored demons or ghosts or something. But still, he was able to translate the mark on Dean’s arm. That night, the first night he’d slept in 40 years, Dean looked down at the dark mark on his arm and let himself wonder like he hadn’t since he was a teenager. Maybe his soulmate _was_ some crazy witch. Or maybe their parents were hippies. Or maybe part of some weirdass cult. It was a _name_ though. “ _Veh-Un-Fam-Gisg-Gon-Graph-Ur,”_ Bobby had told him, horrifying him with the god-awful mouthful for a full minute before explaining it spelt out _Castiel._ The name of a little known angel.

It seemed almost fitting, that on being pulled out of _Hell_ , Dean discovered his soulmate was named after an _angel._ Bobby couldn’t tell him much else, couldn’t even say if it was a girl or a boy’s name. Dean didn’t care though. It was a _name._ Somebody’s name. There was a real live living breathing person out there with _Dean_ on their arm. He had a soulmate. He wasn’t broken.

 _Blue,_  he thought vaguely right before sleep took him. He was pretty sure his soulmate had blue eyes. 

 _Cas-ti-el_.

It was a pretty name really, even if it was weird. He wondered when he’d meet them…


End file.
